Legislation, Collective Memory and History: When the French Legislature Deals with the Past

Abstract

Four legislative Acts have been passed by the French Parliament since 1990 dealing with the memory of the Holocaust, of the Negro Trade and Slavery, of Colonization and the Armenian Genocide, and retrospectively named as lois mémorielles (memorial laws). Since 2005, a large number of history teachers and historians – increasingly anxious about the way law engages with history – made appeals to the French Parliament to stop legislating the past (described in this paper as ‘the memorial laws’ debate’). Taking into consideration the reflections this debate has led to and the repeated warnings against the incursion of law’s reason in the field of historical science, it is argued here that this controversy creates an opportunity to reflect further on the different methodological approaches to knowledge that historians and jurists develop, and their respective relations to history, memory and authority.